(Reuters) - Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco-based activist and
artist best known for creating the rainbow flag representing gay
rights, has died at the age of 65, his longtime friend announced
on social media on Friday.

"My dearest friend in the world is gone. Clive Baker gave the
world the rainbow flag, he gave me forty years of love and
friendship," Cleve Jones said on Twitter.

No details were immediately available on the cause of Baker's
death or where he died. According to the biography posted on his
official website, he had been living in New York City.

Jones also tweeted a photo of Baker with former President Barack
Obama, inviting mourners to meet him under a rainbow flag in the
Castro district of San Francisco on Friday evening to remember
his friend.

Baker, who was born in Kansas in 1951, was stationed in San
Francisco in the early 1970s while serving in the U.S. Army, at
the start of the gay rights movement.

According to the website biography Baker began making banners for
gay rights and anti-war protests, often at the request of Harvey
Milk, who would become the first openly gay man elected to public
office in California when he won the 1977 race for a seat on the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Milk rode under the first rainbow flags made by Baker at the San
Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade in June 1978, just months before
the politician was murdered by a former city supervisor, the
biography says.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by James Dalgleish)

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